Shari Forrest is working at the cutting edge of self-driving car technology, helping robotic vehicles understand the world around them. But Forrest is no artificial intelligence expert beavering away in Silicon Valley for a multimillion-dollar bonus. She’s a 55-year-old freelancer in a small Missouri town, writing word problems for kids by day and building our autonomous future in her spare time, for pennies.

Forrest works for Mighty AI, a crowd-working company that uses people to teach robotic systems how to drive. She is, effectively, the self in the self-driving car. She does this by interpreting pictures and videos, painstakingly outlining and labeling vehicles, people, cyclists, road signs and trees with her computer mouse, or on a smartphone with her finger.

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Forrest is part of a new digital workforce eking out a living, or making extra cash working with and for AI. There are millions of people already busy on crowd-working platforms like Mighty AI, Amazon Mechanical Turk or Figure Eight, and many millions more whose jobs are now shaped by automation and AI. While the threat of robots stealing our jobs looms large, a much more immediate concern is that automation and AI are already massively changing the way we work. And not always for the better.

A study commissioned by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development group of developed countries found that about half of all jobs are likely to be significantly affected by automation in terms of the tasks involved. But for every worker who loses a job to automation, two face changes in the way they work, according to the research.

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Self-driving car companies have plenty of highly paid AI and robotics experts, of course. But much of the data they rely on is coming from people around the world sitting at their computers, or from drivers in computerized cars criss-crossing cities, with little job security.

Similarly, content platforms like Facebook and Instagram have AI systems that automatically scour uploads for hate speech or sexual imagery, but someone has to train those systems and adjudicate edge cases. Some of these people are individual crowd-workers. Others work for moderation companies that outsource the work to people in India and elsewhere.

Because of the scale of the data that people are working with ― millions of roads and billions of social media posts ― many workers in the new digital economy have roles that put them at the mercy of an algorithmic regime, rather than a human boss, and they often have few rights of recourse should anything go wrong.

“The workforce on Mechanical Turk is always turning over,” explains Michael Bernstein, an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Group at Stanford University. “There are always new people. Even if one subset of workers says we don’t like this employer, we’re going to stop working for them, everyone else will still work for them. The American workers don’t think it’s good, but the workers in India, they don’t mind.”

Bernstein tried to set up a crowd-working guild called Dynamo in 2014 to enable collective action, but it was quashed by Amazon.

There are similar issues in another growing area of work where AIs manage and oversee complex distributed systems ― ride-hailing. Every Uber driver depends on the company’s algorithms to present them with trips they might want. Drivers who turn down or cancel too many rides can be locked out of the app or have their account deactivated. Efforts by Uber and Lyft drivers in Seattle to unionize are facing legal challenges from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which includes Uber and Lyft). The group says allowing drivers to bargain over pay would violate federal antitrust rules.

“Antitrust laws were put in place to protect the little guy from monopolistic practices from large corporations, not to shield a company like Uber – valued at over $70 billion – from negotiating with its workers over fair pay and working conditions,” says Don Creery, an Uber and Lyft driver.

A common feature of gig work in the digital economy is that workers never have direct contact with human colleagues or managers. Instead, their priority is satisfying algorithms. “One frustrating piece is how the tasks get served up,” says Forrest, “It will show a task is available, you’ll click on it and it’ll say no more tasks available. There are just so many people on their site clicking at the same time.”

Forrest is valued for her perception and dexterity, but machines must be able to easily work with what she produces. The digital systems of crowd-working leave little room for human creativity or ambiguity. As robots increasingly embody those digital systems, that way of working extends into the physical world. In January, Amazon was granted patents for wristbands that can pinpoint the location of human employees within the company’s vast warehouses, and buzzes if a worker is about to select an incorrect item for packing.

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Don't like your boss? Try complaining about your work schedule, compensation, and conditions with him.

Welcome to the Future.

_________________-- Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.Malaclypse the Younger

glen shops at Walmart because he's PROUD to never buy American when he can keep from it. It's a hatred of American workers. I remember how the right reacted on the board when I posted something on buying union-made candy for Halloween - they screamed thanks, we'll makes sure NEVER to buy those brands again!

Even though glen was raised on union wages, and his elderly mother is cared for by a union pension, he hates unions and American workers.

glen shops at Walmart because he's PROUD to never buy American when he can keep from it. It's a hatred of American workers. I remember how the right reacted on the board when I posted something on buying union-made candy for Halloween - they screamed thanks, we'll makes sure NEVER to buy those brands again!

Even though glen was raised on union wages, and his elderly mother is cared for by a union pension, he hates unions and American workers.

County Commissioner David Hodges voted with the 6-1 majority on April 24 to go with Custom's $41,862 bid over a rival's $33,739 offer based on the U.S.-made promise. He says the commissioners aren't happy and are demanding the furniture be replaced with American-made products..........

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